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Mutability and metaphor: using dry pigments, intense hues and a meditative approach to the painting process, Natvar Bhavsar creates large compositions in which a cosmic vision emerges from lush materiality

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Carter Ratcliff

Since the late 1960s when Natvar Bhavsar first showed his paintings in New York, his art has gone through a series of grand cycles. At one extreme, the image is a field of color inflected only by the grain of the pigments Bhavsar sifts onto the canvas as it lies on the studio floor. Next, swirls and eddies appear. As these currents solidify, one sees at least the suggestion of radiant forms against equally radiant grounds. Then, before these shapes become definite, they dissolve back into the light. This surge toward form first occurred in the mid-1970s. It recurred in the mid-1980s and again in the early '90s. During the past two years or so, the powdery luminosity of Bhavsar's colors has once again been coalescing, more urgently than ever. Cheeraa (2001) shows a golden oval on a dark field of warm, ultimately indescribable color. The oval's border is elusive, as is its interior configuration, for this shape is woven of serenely writhing strands of color. Finally, it is not a shape so much as a concentration of energy. To trace the golden strands, with their dusting of red and orange, is to see form flow back into the swirl of incandescence that has animated Bhavsar's art from the beginning.

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Sometimes, the large cycles of his oeuvre appear, much condensed, in the chromatic pulsations of an individual painting. He applies as many as 80 layers of pigment to a canvas, so a dose look will bring an astonishingly lively texture of colors into focus. As one's focus shifts, new colors--or hints of new shapes--appear and give way to others. Sooner or later, one realizes that the act of seeing changes what is seen. So, to paraphrase Heraclitus, it is impossible to view the same painting twice. But then who--or what--is the producer of the work? The artist, common sense would say; and the idea that viewers create what they see has been familiar since the Romantic period. Cued by Hegel, Clement Greenberg and his followers argued that painting evolves via the medium itself, as it defines and redefines itself in response to the historical moment--as if painters were merely channelling the dictates of the spirit of modernist painting. A different sense of agency prompts Bhavsar to say that he creates in collaboration with a joyous energy "that flows on and on" and "puts you very close to the experience of God." Though his canvases are static, literally speaking, attentive looking endows them with a kind of mutability--metaphorical, to be sure, yet their manifold, layered colors make it impossible to reduce them to stable images. Bhavsar wants to persuade us that all is in motion. Modern physics makes the same point. Though Westerners usually trace this thought to Heraclitus, it appears in the writings of several other pre-Socratics. And in light of Bhavsar's Indian origins, it ought to be noted that all the cosmologies of India--Hindu, Jain and Buddhist--picture the universe in constant flux.

Bhavsar was born in 1934 in Gothava, a town in the slate of Gujarat, on the western coast, of India. In 1958 he earned a master's degree in art at the C.N. School of Art, in Ahmedabad, the Gujarati capital. The following year, he received a government diploma in art, and in 1960 he earned a B.A. in English literature from Gujarat University. By then, he had not only mastered a delicate and lather anonymous style of realism but also invented a style of his own, which owed much to Indian miniatures and even more to Cubism. Sponsored by a family friend in Ahmedabad, he came to the U.S. and entered the Philadelphia College of Art in 1962. After a semester there, he enrolled at the Tyler School of Art, also in Philadelphia. Within a year, he had moved on to the graduate art department of the University of Pennsylvania. In seminars directed by the painter Piero Dorazio, Bhavsar met Robert Motherwell, David Smith, Barnett Newman and others.

By this time, Bhavsar had become an abstract painter. Though the excitement of meeting those major figures of postwar American art remains a vivid memory, it was not until he saw a Clyfford Still exhibition at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, in 1963, that be decisively abandoned the Cubist past for a present dominated by American abstract painting. The mid-1960s were, of course, the salad days of Pop art and Minimalism. As far as Bhavsar was concerned, they might as well have been invisible. Pop was too mundane and Minimalism was too puritanical. Among contemporary artists, only the Color Field painters impressed him, so much so that he wrote a seminar thesis in praise of Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland.

Having received his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, Bhavsar was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship. Instead of returning to India, he moved to New York and landed a teaching job at the University of Rhode Island. Quickly, he made his way into the world of New York painters. By 1968, he had settled in the SoHo loft where he still lives. Two years later, a solo show of his paintings lamlched the Max Hutchinson Gallery, one of the first to open its doors in SoHo. Around this time, Bhavsar's work appeared in a number of group shows at museums in New York and elsewhere, including the Whitney Annual and "Beautiful Painting and Sculpture" at the Jewish Museum.

Mutability and metaphor: using dry pigments, intense hues and a meditative approach to the painting process, Natvar Bhavsar creates large compositions in which a cosmic vision emerges from lush materiality

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Carter Ratcliff

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